What Is Strategic Perspective?

by Malinda Zellman, Demand Media

Viewing this highway photograph expresses one person's perspective.

Hemera Technologies/AbleStock.com/Getty Images

In business, your strategic perspective determines how your company views and solves important issues. Putting the word "strategic" before the word "perspective" indicates a tactical, carefully formulated approach. Say your business discusses withdrawing from a certain market. Your staff discusses the possibilities. But, if you discuss a market withdrawal from a strategic perspective, you will consider the possibilities in light of your predetermined business objectives. You exercise an enlightened process, exploring how the withdrawal affects your business's priorities.

Why a Stronger Strategic Perspective Is Needed

Understanding the significance of a business's strategic perspective invariably encourages business leaders to create a stronger strategic perspective in hopes of making better decisions. Carefully consider the past, present and future of your business objectives. Once senior management clearly envisions its goals and objectives, it makes better decisions in all areas. This can be applied to many aspects of decision making. But, staying with the marketing example for now, establishing clear goals allows effective, profitable marketing decisions -- for developing a branding strategy, generating growth and other key issues. All decisions are viewed within the perspective of your most important goals.

The Strategic Thinking Process

A strategic perspective, formulated by strategic thinkers, puts information into its proper context so it resonates with insight that is relevant to the business's objectives. With the proper perspectives, business analysis results in sometimes-powerful conclusions. Because a business often has many goals and objectives, thinking from a strategic perspective takes all the goals into account, meaning the strategic thinker must consider multiple perspectives. He must juggle objectives of all sorts -- not just a single, overriding objective.

Perspective

Visualize a square drawn on a piece of paper. If an artist added a few more strokes to the page, the square becomes a cube. Suddenly, it has depth, height and width as viewed from a certain vantage point. As a business makes decisions, it has to do more than crunch numbers. Strategic perspectives view a challenge in such a way that succeeds in reaching business goals. Viewing business challenges from multiple perspectives allows the decision maker choices in light of the way each optional solution relates to the next when viewed side-by-side -- like two-dimensional cubes.

Digital Intelligence Perspective

In the world of business, a useful perspective requires good information. Since the 1950s, it has been a commonly held strategy to gather information about your own business and about your competitors. As the Business Centure website states, the way we gather information about our business and its competitors today has moved to digitally interactive, customer-driven sources such as social media. Business Centure predicts that with customer input from social media, the business's customers will increasingly drive business decision making. A wise business today will not ignore customers with such a public platform. Therefore, one strategic perspective for many businesses is the digital intelligence perspective.

About the Author

Malinda Zellman has instructed computer, ESL and GED classes. She is a retired homeschooler and school librarian. She is contributing author for two books, "Games" and "Crafts," by Group Publishing. She has written for print magazines and websites. She holds two BA degrees, business administration and economics, from Rollins College.

Photo Credits

Have Feedback?

Thank you for providing feedback to our Editorial staff on this article. Please fill in the following information so we can alert the Small Business editorial team about a factual or typographical error in this story. All Fields are required.